


Fifteen Ways to Make the Most of Your Journey on Skaianet’s Long Haul Class-800 Military-Grade Fleet, With Your Host, Jake English

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck, Homestuck 2
Genre: F/F, Lalonde Personpain, M/M, Now It's Time For..., Now Try..., Spaceship of Theseus-stuck, You've Heard Of Strider Manpain, You've Heard of Meteorstuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-03 10:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21177653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: “Howdy, there! Welcome to the voyage of a lifetime, sponsored by Crockercorp and brought to you proudly by Skaianet research enterprises! I’m sure you’re already chuffed to be off on such a spiffing adventure, whether serving our little universe’s government or otherwise accomplishing the kind of interstellar diplomacy that demands the use of a cruiser of this magnitude. Skaianet’s Long Haul Class-800 Military-Grade Fleet - ah, there’s a mouthful, heh, to think I signed off on this! - well, these lovely ships are equipped with a whole range of amenities. Whether you’ll be ensconced in this reinforced steel hull for a few days or, safely, up to two decades, you’ll be sure to find plenty with which to occupy yourself while your trip is underway!”Rosebot has altogether too much time to muse over her recent ascension and the accompanying circumstances, mostly-alone on the not-yet-Theseus. Luckily, there's a beta version of some pet project surreptitiously loaded on the cruiser that Dirk... procured. If anyone in paradox space can help her stop overthinking, it has to be Jake English.





	1. Challenge: Accepted.

You’ve passed through almost exactly 1.2973e+9 milliseconds since regaining consciousness in this body. Hovering a chrome-coated hand over a console in the vacant control room, autopilot activated thus far for the duration of your trip, you can access the vessel’s complete travel-log, an admittedly convenient feature. It’s been 1.4148e+9 milliseconds since the ship rose free of the confines of Earth C’s stratosphere.

For all your father seems quite sincerely convinced of the mendacity of time as a concept, at the moment, its passage is all that tethers you to a time before this one. Once Dirk successfully completed the transfer, your home was no longer visible from your position in paradox space. The temporal signature remains fixed in digital space, occupying a palpable digital space beneath the silver sheen of your fingers.

(1.421e+9 milliseconds since you said goodbye. You keep your phone tucked close to your facsimile of a body despite its virtual uselessness as a communication device, _feeling_ rather than watching as the numbers tick slowly further away from her, never more than a few inches from the humming core processor within your chassis.)

It’s for the best. The sooner you locate a viable planet, the sooner this matter will be put to right. The sooner she and everyone you love will be safe, their positions secured in canon. You’ve already sacrificed so much. This should amount to nothing in comparison.

If the pursuit happens to be agonizing, so be it. The undertaking is all the more heroic for its difficulty.

That said, you are unbelievably, undeniably, unyieldingly _bored_.

You’ve already disassembled and summarily reassembled half of the control room, a skill foreign to your consciousness but seemingly native to your constructed embodiment. Even with access to the lexicons of an infinite array of permutations-of-self, you find little _desire_ to tinker, but you really might as well, if only to occupy a more pronounced portion of the prodigious processing power provided by your present personification than simply registering the milliseconds as they tick past.

At this point, you’ve more or less run dry of other obvious ways to pass the time. You no longer need to sleep, your consciousness installed as it is in a body of metal and circuitry. Terezi does little _but_ sleep, it seems, and your father is in the midst of one of his characteristic brooding episodes.

Because you’ve only been granted secondary access to the ship’s systems - rather rude of him, that - you can’t gain entry to his quarters without the approval of higher-tier personnel, namely him, leaving you with little recourse but to figure out how to promote yourself in the database. Hence, the tinkering. Eventually, you’re going to break something enough to figure out how it’s supposed to work.

You’ve been working your way methodically across the access panels, removing and replacing elements as necessary, all of which seems to come quite naturally via an internal repository of mechanical knowledge. Fitting; you knew far less about the interior function of your embodied Self when you were a being of flesh, blood, and finite metaphysical limitations. Now, there is significantly more to know, and significantly more precedent through which to understand it.

A promising little drawer is tucked beneath the first panel of the central console, and after removing the holo screen and investigating the circuitry supporting the device, you reattach the hand-navigation hardware and lower yourself to get a better look. If this one has something to do with authorization… really, it might, as you lean in, you can feel it thrumming with energy…

You press your palm to the front-facing panel and send an identification signature pulsing through.

The glassy surface of the holo screen bursts to life with a flurry of color and sound, only barely recognizable as music through your highly refined auricular circuitry. Surprised, you scramble backwards in a most undignified way before you get your bearings and register the lack of an apparent threat.

A little paper booklet protrudes from the drawer. It reads, in letters so large that the title takes up the entirity of the tri-fold pamphlet, Fifteen Ways to Make the Most of Your Journey on Skaianet’s Long Haul Class-800 Military-Grade Fleet, With Your Host, Jake English [beta version].

Huh.

Even once you’ve settled yourself down, it takes a second to resolve the constellation of millions of tiny pixels hovering suspended over the screen as a moving image rather than a pulsing mass of white light, but once you do, a familiar face materializes. You’re still finding your figurative feet in this body, but you’re acclimating fairly quickly, you like to think. (1.29732e+9 milliseconds)

Robotically superaugmented extrasensory vision or not, there’s no mistaking the unnaturally rakish grin or the booming baritone of the man presenting the program.

As though hovering in the control chamber just a few feet away, Jake English, almost indistinguishable from your last memory of him, when he was… on television? Some program in the background at the doctor’s office?... offers you a set of finger guns and a wink as what you conclude is meant to be inspirational music plays and the title rolls across the screen. Yes, it’s a bit of a mouthful.

“Howdy, there! Welcome to the voyage of a lifetime, sponsored by Crockercorp and brought to you proudly by Skaianet research enterprises! I’m sure you’re already chuffed to be off on such a spiffing adventure, whether proudly serving our little universe’s government or otherwise accomplishing the kind of interstellar diplomacy that demands the use of a cruiser of this magnitude. Skaianet’s Long Haul Class-800 Military-Grade Fleet - ah, there’s a mouthful, heh, to think I signed off on this! - well, these lovely ships are equipped with a whole range of amenities. Whether you’ll be ensconced in this reinforced steel hull for a few days or, safely, up to two decades, you’ll be sure to find plenty with which to occupy yourself while your trip is underway!”

Glancing down at the pamphlet, which strikes you as surprisingly low-tech for such a wildly advanced piece of equipment, you find the beginnings of a list on the center portion. Hm.

“This is merely a trial run of this functionality, of course, I s’pose the final product will be far more polished,” he adds, and it takes you a fraction of a millisecond to realize that he’s describing the hologram, or perhaps his script, and not responding to your perusal of the fold-out.

You set it aside. If you could frown, you would be doing so, without malice, but with the beginnings of sincere interest.

“Alright, with that out of the way… I’m sure I can spruce the intro up a bit, given some time, but do take the first draft into consideration!... to the list! I’ve prepared it personally, well, with some advisement from Janey’s advertising folks, and I’m pretty sure Jade was around and we were shooting the breeze and the idea came up, I’m not really sure who got to it first, but she’s been awfully helpful, and this’ll probably have to go through Dirk at some point, since… cripes, I don’t _know_ why, he’s got nothing to do with this company, but I think he just likes to be included! And, uh, reacts somewhat volatile-y in response to… not being included, so, ah, let’s strike that bit from the record, perhaps, haha.”

He clears his throat, slipping easily back into a smiling, buoyant countenance.

“Now then! Some suggestions for the weary travelers, or for those prone to boredom in close quarters! I figure you’ll want a little more explanation than just the list, so I’ve prepared an explanation and tutorial for each component, lest you find yourself in the depths of paradox space, up to your ears in boredom and without the means to mitigate it! We at Skaianet have made every endeavor to bring the most cutting-edge and delightful of in-space entertainment technology straight into your grasp, and the possibilities are limitless. Frankly, I could be here for the rest of the year listing off every functionality, and that wouldn’t be fun for anyone, would it? Well, some people might be into that, I guess, I’ll have to look into it. Would that make sense? Really, I’ll have to ask someone, it seems like it might be… erm, nevermind. Back to it! Note to self, polish that little hiccup out of the spiel before you do anything with this prototype!”

The hologram shimmers as the image of Jake pulls a marker out of his overshirt pocket and scrawls a reminder on his forearm, which is already stained black with a dozen other similar reminders.

“If you’ll open your pamphlet to the first item on the list, you’re going to want to lay one of your digits down over the paper to summon up my helpful commentary! And do let me know what needs workshopping and what just, well, _works_!” he says.

With that, the image lapses into some sort of holo-screen-saver state, smiling and intermittently tossing up a few more finger guns or striking a… quite provocative pose.

You look down at the pamphlet again, more critically this time, only to register the activation of the in-ship intercom.

“Any particular reason I’ve got seventy-four notifications of sub-authorization tampering in the control room?”

“I haven’t yet had time to tamper with the rest. My apologies. I’ve been slacking off.”

Setting the pamphlet back into the drawer, you observe that the hologram dissipates into a near-invisible energy field, then to nothing. Interesting. You’ll have to do some reading on these systems. Particularly the fact that this element of the ship is in beta might offer some opportunities for exploitation.

“If you’re bored, just say so. Don’t wreck my ship.”

“If you don’t want me to wreck your ship, amuse me. I understand it may be something of a while before we have the opportunity to do anything of canonical significance.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were you expecting nonstop laughs? Dinner and a show? An Olivia cruise? This is metanarrative existence-or-nonexistence, Rose, and you’re _dicking around with my ship_.”

“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the floor.”

“Beds are too soft. You know that. My goddamn back -”

“Ah, the endless sufferings and tribulations of the meatbound,” you interrupt. “If you’ve finished staring off into the middle distance, remembering anime from alternate universes, I’ll come by your quarters.”

“Fuck you. I’m remembering a great episode of Durarara!! and I can’t possibly express how little I need another snarky AI in my life.”

“I can only exist within the parameters you set for me, father dearest. I assume this is an open invitation to discuss my speculation on your motivations for doing so, which I believe stems from a psychosexual fixation on the artificial counterpart of yours that you have elucidated in the past while under the influence of marijuana. Would you like to propose an antithesis to match my thesis? Let’s get dialectic, dad.”

“Words fail me.”

“Now this I have to see.”

While your attention is momentarily diverted to the more pressing concern of nudging your father in the direction of subjects that he seems reluctant to breach - he has constructed a careful mental partition, which prevents you from accessing most of his more personal thoughts, much to your irritation, what’s the _point_ of being a Seer if you can’t See anything interesting - you partition the discovery of the pamphlet in a less vital processing center for future reference.

You only got a glance at the list, but your perfect recall is sufficient to call it up at will.

At the moment, you are unprepared to weigh in, not having allocated sufficient effort to _processing_ what you’ve read, figuratively rather than literally, but the data remains there, ready to access.

1\. Roll back the patented Transparapace™ viewport skylight in the control room to take in the sights of paradox space firsthand!

2\. Take advantage of the unlimited appearifier aperture, courtesy of Crockercorp’s generous sponsorship of our universe’s military apparatus!

3\. Test your skills on one of the many in-vessel shooting ranges, each of which is furnished with the capacity for any internationally sanctioned small-arm or automatic rifle!

4\. Try your hand at one of the many iconic Crockercorp alchemic creations, as described in my cookbook, Jake English Presents: Alchemic Meals in Fifteen Minutes or Less, Featuring Jake English, which conveniently auto-downloads to any wireless device used onboard!

5\. Have a nip of the good stuff - on us. All Skaianet ships designated class-800 or above are kitted out with a fully stocked liquor cabinet for each stateroom!

6\. Compete at a round or four of insider-vetted trivia on the lives, achievements, and follies of Earth C’s elder gods!

7\. Tone up with any of a vast catalogue of hikes, sojourns, and mountainous peregrinations, all available in full augmented reality at any of a number of exer-ports located in common spaces throughout the ship!

8\. Enjoy our near-infinite archive of multidimensionally licensed comic books and graphic novels, featuring Earth C’s favorite heroes and heroines, as well as a few of mine!

9\. Summon up an augmented reality companion to follow you about your duties on the bridge, now including two different simulated first guardian settings!

10\. Get creative with your onboard wardrobifier, each of which includes your own personal stylist, an artificial intelligence provided through extensive interviews with sub-deity of space, creator of our universe, and noted fashionista Kanaya Maryam!

11\. Keep those combat skills sharp in our anti-gravity scrum simulator, now improved with greater flame-resistance and a wider variety of simulated combat partners, including yours truly!

12\. Catch up with the latest flicks, beamed straight to the big screen via spacey-type mechanisms, in our fully-outfitted theatre!

13\. Indulge in a variety of top-of-the-line pre-formulated baked goods, with inbuilt alchemic instructions courtesy of Crockercorp!

14\. Round up some buddies for any of a number of rousing party games, from king cup and raise your glass to the classic can-flipper and kill-Lord-English!

15\. Make use of our exo-vessel life support field to briefly experience the ice-cold vacuum of paradox space yourself, more or less safely!

You resolve, before too long, to give a few of the tutorials a try. There is no knot too complex to be worried at and unravelled. The ship, and the walled-off corners of your father’s mind, are not enigmas to be dismissed. They are distractions in which to indulge; problems to be solved.

(1.422e+9 milliseconds since she let you go.)

The phone is warm against the chrome plating of your chest. 

You will have to think of somewhere else to store it. Kept so near the place where your heart ought to be, it is almost too heavy to bear.


	2. Item 1.

1\. Roll back the patented Transparapace™ viewport skylight in the control room to take in the sights of paradox space firsthand!

“Alrighty then, gentle travelers,” the apparition-of-Jake begins, shifted from his pause state to an expression of wholehearted enthusiasm with the touch of a gleaming metal finger to the first number on the pamphlet. “For the first entry on our list of misadventures together, you shan’t have to go far! Right here in the control room, you’ve got everything you could need. See, the Transparapace is constructed in much the same way that one would bulletproof glass, designed to be nigh-impenetrable even at perilously high velocities!”

The hologram seems to pause momentarily, and you pause along with it, considering whether you ought to try waving your hand in the general direction of the sparkling figure, but Jake simply seems to have… paused, mid-delivery, and resumes his exposition fairly promptly.

It occurs to you that the inhuman processing capability of your unencumbered internal system may be the only reason you noticed anything was awry.

“I’ve broken an awful lot of glass in my day,” he says cheerfully. “Windows, bottles, these damn spectacles and all, and I consider myself something of an expert on the topic, haha. But Transparapace is a whole different kettle of fish.”

As he says this, he gestures up at the ceiling of the control room, a high-set, vaulted assemblage of semi-opaque red panels. This is one of the largest spaces on the ship; you’ve wandered through most of them. You gather that, aesthetically, it’s meant to convey a stark and militaristic sort of grandeur. Empty, with only the whirring of machinery and the voice of the hologram to fill the impractically capacious chamber, it acts as magnification for a sense of isolation and disconnect.

It’s the sort of space that ought to be filled with bickering teenagers refusing to speak to each other face-to-face, communicating through a chat client despite the fact that their friends are literal arm-lengths away.

You don’t want anything to do with these memories, crystallized by near-infinite permutations of yourself and your experiences of them. And so you expertly cease to consider it, with all the panache of a force-quit when it becomes clear that your browser isn’t going to load a sketchily downloaded knitting pattern.

No more of that.

“We start out in the construction of Transparapace with the fairly standard layers of aluminum oxynitride, or ‘ALON’, sheeted with a flexible and highly processed aramide modeled after spider silk! That one was my idea. Of course, the difficulty there is the manufacture of a massive, unbroken sheet of the material. That’s where the science and a little bit of Space and Hope come in, since ALON, a material with a beautifully intricate cubic spinel molecular structure, is awfully difficult to generate on a large scale - oh, sorry, sorry, you’re right, I’ll definitely have to cut some of this. You’re here to see the glimmer of universes on the horizon, not to hear me go on about glass. Suffice to say, the stuff will keep you very safe!”

Someone outside of the capture field of the holo-camera seems to be saying something, and he nods, making eye contact with some point in the distance. The resolution of whatever they’re saying is entirely lost, simply not enough information to reconstruct the vocal patterns, though you give it a try.

Hrm. _You_ wanted to hear about the aluminum oxynitride.

Re-adopting his persona as though he’s sweeping on a cape, Jake snaps his fingers exaggeratedly, and with a soft noise and an intensification of the already omnipresent hum of machinery, the red-orange covering, which you now realize is affixed extrinsically to the ship, begins to roll back beneath some unseen layer of reinforced steel. Where it is drawn away, a perfectly clear sheet of… Transparapace™, you suppose… remains as an intermediary between yourself and the inky blackness of paradox space.

Slowly, the entirety of the control room’s ceiling yields to near-perfect clarity, and the mechanisms to draw back the colorful shield go silent.

“I haven’t yet been up to see firsthand, but Jade assures me… well, she helped me write a little something for the occasion, and really, I wish I could be up there with you. What a grand adventure you must be on, now! You can’t imagine the vicarious thrill, that you might be light-years away, even now, looking up at these same echoes of dead universes that I can track through my telescope. I’m sincerely tickled pink on your behalf, off to save the day, perform some vital function, accomplish a daring mission like an old-fashioned - shoot, where’d I put that paper?”

He actually disappears from the hologram for a split second, leaving the brilliant golden light suspended wanly in midair without a figure to capture, and you can hear the recording device pick up the sound of ruffled papers.

“Beta version,” he says, smiling sheepishly as he returns. “I’m telling you, once I get this ironed out, this’ll just be the peak functionality of these ships, I really do believe it.”

You cross your arms in discomfort. The hologram, as you become accustomed to viewing it in a register comparable to human capacity - you are capable of limiting your visual processing acuity to that realm, with effort - is unsettlingly realistic, all the more so for the complete lack of polish.

This is, by an order of magnitude, the most words that have passed between you and Jake English.

“Look up, now. I can’t yet guarantee the accuracy of the program, but let’s give it a try, shall we? I’ll read off what we know, and we’ll let the program spit you out something coherent based on your actual paradoxical coordinates.”

He clears his throat.

“Alright, I have to take her word on this, but… look up, if you please. Might be a bit of neck strain, but luckily we’ve got this excellent 180-degree recline-capable bridge-seating, so go ahead and get settled in!”

One significant advantage of occupying a Self made of metal is the complete disregard you can pay to concepts such as ‘neck strain’. Obligingly, you tilt your head up to face the inky black expanse of paradox space.

“Might want to turn the lights off, as well. I’ll do that for you, if you give the command!”

“Lights off,” you say.

Of late, you prefer not to move you mouth in speech, instead making use of the impossibly high-quality speakers located in your throat, and with bi-directional orientation in each corner of your mouth, though you’re capable of performing the necessary autoventriloquism to produce the effect. 

It seems, however, something of a redundant functionality. In… life, you would have preferred the capacity to exert this kind of absolute control over your expressions, what you divulged about yourself, so often more than you would have strictly liked without meaning to.

In a way, this is a tremendous improvement, really.

As this portion of the ship goes dark, which seems like it might have unintended consequences, were you attempting any sort of endeavor that required either sustained visibility or lack thereof. Ah, well. Clearly not the case, here.

“We’ll start at the bow end. Back here, you may see what appears to be a tiny cluster of distant stars, almost faint enough to resemble a tiny cloud. At the moment, this formation is known as the Genesis Cluster. Recent probes by Skaianet and consultation with our own gods of Space and Time - ah, I anticipate that we’ll superimpose some of the images here, it’s quite a sight - suggest that these pinpricks of light are in fact the remnants of a universal system a great many millennia older than our own. In fact, this would be the oldest we’ve discovered so far!”

As he speaks, the paneled ceiling takes on a shimmering golden glow, shifting seamlessly into configurations that illustrate his words. A six-planet universal session diagram, a faint cluster of similar pockets of energy, morphing into an almost jarringly accurate depiction of a behemoth of a frog, its warm luminescence bright enough to eclipse the stars themselves as it inflates its massive vocal sac.

“The light you’re seeing now was cast off by a long-dead iteration of the game through which we created Earth C. Based on sheer age alone, some Skaian historians speculate that the haze of vestigial light-energy veiling the cluster, complicating our efforts to clearly photograph the individual universes it contains, may be vestigial to the hatching of the first ever genesis frog.”

So the program works. You reach out a hand, pressing your palm to the console and searching through the database until you find what you’re looking for. Jade’s signature in the comments - well, not explicitly, just a few telltale turns of phrase detailing the necessity for a parsing algorithm here, the source for a set of motion-simulation parameters there.

It’s beautiful. There’s no world in which this stunning light show could have been produced by anyone but Jade.

“According to our best estimates, this celestial formation should continue to sputter out energy for about the next two hundred and fifty million years or so. We’re not yet sure what will happen when it goes dark. Some scientists speculate that a furnace more potent than even the green sun once burned in these approximate coordinates, but that we’re a quarter of a billion years from the full extent of the interuniversal consequences.”

Light ripples as each pinprick jitters wildly in place, then swirls abruptly to the center of the massive screen with a pulse of pure-white energy that vanishes into nothing, extinguished like a candleflame between two fingers.

Jake calmly continues to forecast the end of the universe.

“Some of us - ha, no one I’ll name, for his own damned pride! - find this a terrifying prospect, which I suppose is fair. All things coming to an end, there’s a difficult thing to explain to a young buck still waiting breathlessly for the sequel to Avatar! At the same time, there’s a comfort to endings, don’t you think? That one day all this hue and cry and hullabaloo might have some resolution to it. Even if it doesn’t, I mean, that we might just get a blasted chance to… to _rest_, to just… oh, I don’t know, I’m awfully tired, it was a late night for me, let’s take a break after this one, shall we?”

He frowns to himself, raking his hand through his hair, glancing up ruefully at whatever person he’s been dictating to. 

You wish you could parse the answer to that for yourself, but you can’t gather up a sufficiently high-resolution image from the reflection in his glasses. The ridiculous things are coated so as not to obscure his eyes.

“You’re right, of course. I’ve no real reason to be all dark-cloud and whatnot! Alright, back to the script. If you’ll direct your attention forward from the Genesis Cluster, you’ll catch a distant glimpse of a much-beloved flickering green light, visible with the naked eye! That’s exactly what you think it is.”

The program continues for a reasonably informative hour. A good portion of what qualifies as entry-level Skaian astronomy is easy to absorb by osmosis in Jade’s presence. A wrinkle forms, here, as you think this. How long has it been since you saw Jade? A good while, certainly, but it can’t have been more than… than…

Unfortunately, you don’t have a recorded interval to consult. Just vague memories, swimming in the inadequacy of human vision. Hardly a comfort. You dismiss the thought. Ascension was a difficult process. You possess the memories of every self. Perhaps you’re remembering someone else’s… loneliness.

Because you’re a lot of things. You were a lot of things, even before you were everything.

But nothing about Earth C was supposed to be lonely. You were never the lonely one. You made very sure of that. In fact, you recall many conversations with Kanaya quite clearly, fretting aloud over breakfast, newspapers folded away in your respective laps, the window open, sun sparkling through a cut glass vase full of flowers, it was _John_ you… worried… about.

John is dead, and the less you think of that, the better.

You return your attention to the stars, to the soothing tone of Jake’s voice. Precious few memories of him wait to sink their teeth into you in any universe. You appreciate that. His disconnect from your past. There isn’t a spectacular array to see; the field of view is limited by the area in which your ship is traveling as much as by the single hemisphere of the available scenery, and a few times you see the telltale skip of the hologram that suggests something has been cut out.

Much to your frustration, you aren’t completely sure how to break into this sort of software system, or even how to get started. Perhaps you can access some reading materials at some point that will elucidate the task. For now, you watch, and you wonder, and you disengage from who you were. That was always the point of ascension, after all.

To leave Rose-who-was behind, in the service of something greater. Her trappings and her artifice and her loves and her loneliness. Impossibly far away. Outside of the realm of truth, now. The truth of you is this, a being within an articulated form of steel alloy and chrome, gazing at the stars. Not above you, but around you.

“Now, let’s close this little jaunt with a real treat for the weary traveller far from home. Earth C, as we all know, is not an independently energy-emitting celestial body at the same scale as a star system, which makes it rather trickier than most to view from a great distance. Particularly the sort of vast treks this ol’ craft is designed to plumb! But sometimes, it’s awfully nice to be reminded of where you came from. Any time you like, the entirety of Skaianet’s Long Haul Class-800 Military-Grade Fleet is equipped with a useful little function, yet another marriage of space and hope in the developmental process.”

He smiles widely, sincerely.

“Jade really does have a way with words, doesn’t she? Ask the ship where home is, any time you like, and whatever that means to you, she’ll show you!”

With an even wider grin, he waves his hands about illustratively, summoning up a thrumming beacon of white-gold light that shapes itself, in response to a few expert flicks of his fingers, to an arrow.

“ Of course, you can ask about other things - even once this program is done, feel free to mess around a bit and ask it to point out, I don’t know, where you left your keys, or the way to your quarters, or which is the freshest of a bundle of alchemized grapes! But this way, you’ll never lose sight of the path back to where you came from. I know it’s awfully lonely out in the depths of paradox space. Better than most people, I’d wager! But you got where you are by leaving somewhere, and it’ll still be there when you’re done.”

His smile wavers slightly, and the conjured-up arrow floats out of his hands to hover before you, suspended in midair.

“We at Skaianet, ah, thank you most ardently for your service to our corner of the multiverse,” he says. “Really, I… yes, I should probably ask someone to write this bit for me too, right? I’m none too expert with these matters. Heh. Thanks for listening to me jaw for an hour or so, I think I really might head in for some shuteye soon… no, truly, thank _you!_”

Now that he’s stopped addressing the holo recorder and turned away, in three-fourths profile rather than facing you, you wait for the program to cut out, but it doesn’t. He fades slightly as he slumps, his posture dissolving from a proud stance to a slouch as he digs around in his pocket, still within range of the recorder that he’s completely forgotten about.

A lesser woman might balk at the intrusion, but you are Rose Lalonde, and you have never in your life had a qualm about the sanctity of your friends’ private lives. You’re a Seer. The information has always been more or less thrust upon you.

Though you never really thought to look too closely at Jake, before.

He finds what he’s looking for. An old-fashioned flip-top cell phone, into which he punches a number, looking tired and vaguely anxious.

“Come on,” he mutters. “Come on, don’t do this…”

The phone makes a rattling beep, and he curses to himself, then straightens his posture and pastes on a grin.

“Hi there, Dirk! Seems I must have just missed you. Ah, no worries. I was hoping not to play phone tag after, well, last night. I don’t suppose you feel any better about the whole matter than I do, and if you want to… at any point, if you’d like to… sort things out a bit, I’ll be… I’ll be here! You know, where I always am! Waiting at the end of this blasted phone line like a dog on a goddamned leash!”

He curses again, drops the phone to his side, paces nearly out of range of the recording device. You cant your head curiously, following his movements as best you can, altering your visual processing settings and sharpening your auditory capacity when the image and sound grow dull.

“I… I’m sorry, Dirk, really, I don’t know what to say, I’m terrible at this, you know I am, you’ve said as much yourse- no. I’m not making excuses, I’m apologizing. For once, someone has to be the bigger goddamned man, and… call me, alright? Just call me.”

With another harsh profanity, he turns back to the recording device, waves his hand, and reverts to his pause state, smiling placidly, breathing with a soothing regularity, stopping to shoot you a pair of finger guns that are impossible to interpret as anything but sincere.

Huh.

Interesting.

You file all of that away, and return your attention to the neat little spear of light, what almost looks like the orienting arrow of a compass, floating just below your eye level. You reach out to touch it, and find its electrosensory profile produces a pleasing sort of buzz. You can still feel things. He assured you of that, that he had no intention of allowing any element of your physicality to be forfeit to ascension.

It’s different, though.

You relay a nonverbal command to the interface, and the hologram of Jake dematerializes in a flurry of golden sparks.

No one is around. You made sure of that, not especially wanting to be interrogated by either your father or your trollian class-counterpart about your activities. For now, this is something that belongs to you.

The viewport remains clear overhead.

“Where is Earth C?” you ask aloud, via your speaker system.

With a little burst of energy, the orienting arrow spins to indicate a point just outside of the viewport’s field. Too bad. He was right. It would have been nice, to… know. Though he mentioned a different functionality, a different question. You wonder if it might summon up some sort of static image of Earth C, a nice glowing representation that you could peruse.

“Show me home,” you continue, half-wondering if your true opinion isn’t, in some way, this ship itself. After all, it is where you’re supposed to be. You feel that with overwhelming certainty.

There are few things that you are more certain of than your love for those you left behind, and the necessity that, for their safety, for the endurance of all they hold dear, you must be precisely where you are.

A hope-based answer to your question would point you straight to the place where your feet are planted against the plated steel flooring, right?

But the hovering arrow, once its animation is completed, points… no, not quite at Earth C, either. Somewhere different, a hair’s breadth from its previous placement, only visible due to your robotically enhanced sense of vision-based spatial positioning. The ship didn’t rock or shift, did it?

No, you would have felt that.

You sigh. Clearly an imperfect program in its beta stages. What else did you expect? Not even Jade can expect to get everything right the first time.

“Thank you,” you tell the floating arrow. “That will be all.”

It winks out of existence, leaving you alone in the dark control chamber, paradox space, in all its infinite expanse, sprawling out in every direction. The stars are slightly more familiar than they were before.

All in all, not the worst way to pass an hour or two.

You leave the opaque red hood of the ship furled and tucked away, the light of the distant multiverses just barely illuminating the chamber, unobstructed, as you retreat to your quarters. 

Perhaps Dirk or Terezi will appreciate it, when next they think to venture out of their respective quarters.

It is, after all, quite lovely.

On your way back to your own quarters, you have the jarring recollection that you've ceased monitoring the temporal distance log generated by the phone currently tucked to your hip. If you could frown at your own complacency, you would, reaching down to press your fingers to the little plastic aperture that anchors you to your past. He said as much - there's no harm in remembering where you come from. It's a good hurt.

1.583e+9 milliseconds.

You're beginning to think that you may not see Kanaya again for a very long while. Perhaps there is some appeal to your father's denial of time's existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to post three installments of this at a time - effectively, 1-3, 4-6, etc. I have elected not to do this, so expect more frequent updates with single-item contents. 
> 
> I'm already making a great deal of progress on other chapters, so I hope to be quite regular about posting, at least between deployments. Which is to say, I won't post on days that I'm on a boat, but I probably will on days when I am not! :)


	3. Item 2.

You make a habit of occupying yourself in much the same way that you always have, in the absence of anything particularly interesting to do. With only fourteen items remaining on your list of more high-octane distractions, you put them off for when the monotony of the ship becomes truly dire, and instead confine yourself to a largely purposeless storeroom filled with crates and cargo, most of it draped invitingly with white dropcloths.

The effect is that of a particularly eerie Victorian mansion, abandoned for the season, possibly haunted. It even smells oddly familiar, a bit like your mother’s lab, as you remember it.

Exactly the sort of surroundings befitting your pensive mood.

While the applications of your current physical embodiment allow you to transcribe words, essentially, as you _think_, you find comfort in decaptchaloguing a set of finely-bound journals gifted to you by Roxy a few years prior, which were a lovely gesture, but quite unnecessary at the time. Surely, he was aware that you did most of your writing in easily-sorted online documents since leaving your childhood behind on Earth B.

Writing by hand, though, even by a hand that isn’t strictly yours, reminds you, in a thousand-thousand fractal windows through truth and reality itself, of hours passed at the same endeavor in your long-forgotten bedroom.

You seat yourself among the sheeted ghosts in the cargo hold, and the memories in which you immerse yourself only impart the typical twinge of self-conscious unease. It’s enough to obfuscate the deeper existential discomfort, which is, you suppose, the product of your tenuous connection to canon. A relief, to be able to name the vestigial _feeling_ that twists in your core.

Steeping in the ghostly silence of the storeroom, you write.

Ideas for these projects seem to come more easily than usual, post-ascension, which you would have expected, had you given any thought to the idea. With infinite experiential frames of reference to draw upon, infinite selves splintering out from your entrance to the medium a linear-decade prior, your lexicon has expanded drastically. There are new hurts to press at, new grievances to untangle, new joys to relive.

Through the helpful lens of wizardfic, of course.

You grow distracted, though, as you find, with some contemplation, that you can revisit versions of your own work that you don’t strictly remember writing. Or did you write them? Your memory, much to your irritation, continues to fail you in the strangest ways. Owed less to any deficit in processing power than to… a fundamental inspissation of your selves, in their limitlessness. Memory is, by nature, a recollection that can be defined, parsed, sorted as a component of the self.

For now, you have not yet determined… how to do that.

But you take a respite from your writing, once you fill the first book with neat purple scrawl, and revisit the original, if anything can be called the original. You pace yourself, as agonizing as it is to do so, dedicating a vast quantity of your systemic attention to a deep and thorough read, cross-referencing each recollection with as many others as you feasibly can.

It’s good work, really. You find yourself quite thoroughly immersed, and by the end, you are sacrificing depth for speed as you race to the conclusion.

Standing over the man who had been so many things to them - father, tormentor, jailer, opponent, quarry, love - Calmasis leveled their wand at the panting white-robed form sprawled across the shattered chessboard with a countenance of pure calm. The kings were long since toppled. Only the two of them remained.

And they had done the impossible and triumphed.

"Deluded old fool that you are, Zazzerpan, you sought to win a game played by rules that you could never hope to comprehend. Rules that I rewrote, to which you voluntarily assented.”

“Calmasis,” the defeated wizard, slumped with the spent concentration of their long, metaphysical dance through the game, murmured, “As a mentor, I never could have hoped for anything but that you would someday surpass me. You have. I could never deny -”

“Then don’t. Deny nothing. Only look at me, and hear me, for once. Hear me, as you and the Learned refused to, for so long. Damn it, _look at me_! You’ve taken everything from me. Everything! Don’t _deny me_ this!”

A bolt of brilliant white light tore through the still air that hung over the battlefield, ignited with the ferocious energy of Calmasis’ frustration, their pure and unyielding rage, so long suppressed. The color had long since seeped out of their majyyks, leaving only the same blinding white of their deposed mentor. Zazzerpan no longer possessed the power to resist them. He raised his head, slowly, his luminous grey-white gaze, swirled and opaque as fine-grained marble, dimmed by exhaustion and pain.

Wreathed, in this way, by crackling white lightning, the old wizard was to his former acolyte as a cast-open book. Infinitely comprehensible, his once formidably guarded secrets laid bare in his defeat.

And he faced Calmasis at last.

And they waited, the moment hung suspended in time, for the catharsis to come.

It never did.

“My disciple,” Zazzerpan whispered. “My proudest work. I have always seen you. Always heard you. Look into my mind. You will find the truth there, as has always been your gift.”

Calmasis trembled, clenching their fist around the tendrils of their power tracing up their arm, narrowing their focus, allowing the old man’s head to droop forward.

“No,” they insisted. “No!”

“Your weakness, Calmasis, has always been your hubris. You are a pawn that believes themself to be the queen. Such confidence has been the undoing of many a great wizard. It has been mine more often than most, and will be, one last time. You needed a hand to guide you, but you bit any that I freely offered. I knew…” the aged wizard paused, spitting out a mouthful of red-stained saliva. The finishing salvo had affected him more devastatingly than he had initially let on, no doubt. “If I was to help you, I would have to do it more subtly.”

“Help me? You tormented me! You and all of them - apprenticing me to Frigglish, that joke of a resentful dipsomaniac? The Learned cast me out. Cast all of us out, in one way or another. Don’t think you can provoke me so easily, Zazzerpan. I’ve taken on your lessons all too well. You’ve created your own monster, don’t you understand? With the poison of your _help_? If you didn’t want me to learn to be _like you_, you should never have _taught me_.”

Zazzerpan opened his mouth as though to speak, only to be wracked with spasms. Calmasis watched, their brows knitted together in concern, the realization dawning on them that the old man was _laughing_.

With a cry of rage, they tightened the grip of their power around his neck, cutting off any further mockery.

“Calmasis,” he choked. “You are everything I ever wanted you to be. Everything our prophets could not comprehend.”

“I am _nothing_ like -!”

“You are… exactly… what you were meant to be. Beyond destiny, beyond the walled limits that have constrained us for so long. You will do… everything that I could not.”

“The game is over, old man. In fact, I’m through with your games on a permanent basis. And I’m growing weary of _you_.”

“The game is never over,” Zazzerpan declared, his voice only barely muffled, now, as their power fell away, as their conviction wavered. “Do you remember your first lesson with me, Calmasis?”

How could they have forgotten?

A chessboard, situated atop a conjured table, softly luminous white with Zazzerpan’s power. A trick, they knew by now, to disorient an opponent, to invite them to believe the stories they had surely heard. That Zazzerpan could not be bested. That even the gods had failed before him on the chessboard. That the outcome of the match was inevitable. That his power was absolute.

The game, Zazzerpan had told them, noting Calmasis’ scornfully raised eyebrow, began long before two opponents faced each other, and never truly ended. The ripples of a single pebble tossed into a pond do not end with the stone itself. All things are connected to all other things that matter. And the works of wizards, he explained, with a twinkle in his disorientingly white and pupil-less eyes, whether chess or spellcraft or merely one of Smarny’s delightful baked goods, always matter.

In the match that followed, Zazzerpan trounced them handily and sent them on their way, back to Frigglish and his loathsome beard and his bizarrely-decorated study that always smelled so cloyingly of wizardly spirits.

Calmasis stiffened with a moment of pure clarity, of understanding. Of _horror_.

”Then this truly was all a game to you? Was that why you turned Kalathea away from me, was she… a glowing end-table to remind me of your power? Or was she merely _in the way_?”

”Forgive me, Calmasis,” Zazzerpan said kindly, but dangerously, a uniquely condescending rattlesnake warning subtly before the killing strike. As he spoke, he found his way slowly to a standing position, though the pain of his last defeat still weighed heavy in his voice. “But I don’t think you can lay the blame for Kalathea’s betrayal at my feet. I’ll tell you, now that it no longer matters - now that you and I are the only ones left who matter - that she did sincerely love you. Who you were, at least. Look closer at your memories, my protégé. _Remember_. I won’t stop you.”

You abruptly register a slight but definite shudder to the ship’s trajectory, and depart from your recollections. Reading will have to wait. The present, and the future, need you far more urgently than the past.

No alarms immediately sound, which is either a relief or cause for far greater concern. Your pace, as you make for the control room, is brisk but not obviously hurried. Best not to blow anything out of proportion until necessary. On your way, you pass what is ostensibly the galley, though you’ve never had cause to enter it.

Determining, though, that it is the origin of the disruption to the ship’s flight pattern, somehow, you step inside.

Terezi, you find, has effectively beaten you to item number two of the list. 

2\. Take advantage of the unlimited appearifier aperture, courtesy of Crockercorp’s generous sponsorship of our universe’s military apparatus!

“I meant for this to happen,” she calls irritably from the far end of the chamber, as you open the sliding-panel port to reveal a growing pile of wet tobacco leaves, spat out one by one from a neat red device that you suppose is a Crockercorp appearifier aperture.

In the center of the mess, Terezi sits, punching random buttons on the machine. In response to her ministrations, it begins to spit out _twice_ as many tobacco leaves.

“I see you’ve encountered the unlimited appearifier aperture,” you say, closing the port behind you.

“On purpose,” she clarifies. “There’s nothing to eat around here.”

“A fair concern. Ameliorated quite thoroughly by the appearification of several metric tons of uncured _Nicotiana_ leaves.”

You assume that Dirk is taking his meals in his quarters, and likely brought his own food, along with a truly prodigious quantity of what he describes (not defensively, _never_ defensively) as ‘finely aged orange soda’.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” she says.

“Is there anything I might be able to do to help you out?” you suggest flatly, crossing your arms with a jarring noise of metal on metal, to which you are not yet completely accustomed.

She twirls a leaf between her fingers by the stem, popping it into her mouth with an audible wet _smack_. You are well past being surprised by any action in Terezi’s repertoire, and largely ignore her.

“Could use some vinegar-tomato smoothie.”

“As you like it.”

Leaving her to contend with the growing forest of tobacco leaves, which will soon be large enough to fall under the purview of a ship-based Department of Parks and Recreation, you access one of the nearest appearifiers. It’s a relatively basic model, typically metered to avoid prodigious levels of waste such as the utter cataclysm taking place on the other side of the room, but you supposed that ‘unlimited’, in this case, truly does mean unlimited.

Alas.

Tapping in a few coordinates, as furnished by an inbuilt guide that you access with a pulse of energy from your palm, you appearify a bottle of ketchup for your resident disruption and power down the machine. Dirk has been awfully opaque as to why Terezi is travelling with you. So much of the time between your disconnection with your corporeal form and your awakening on the ship (1.59441e+9 milliseconds prior) is only diaphanously defined at best, like trying to read a manuscript printed on a single sheet of white tulle, swaying in a warm breeze.

Terezi snatches the bottle of sauce unceremoniously from your grip and shoves several handfuls of leaves into the pockets of her jeans.

“Are you… well?” you ask, somewhat curiously, as she contorts her face and scrambles to her feet.

“Yeah, fantastic! Your insufferable father’s media choices are giving me a really delightful headache.”

“I would imagine that his beloved anime might be overwhelming from your sensory perspective,” you agree.

“You have no idea.”

“Actually, you might be surprised by the extent to which I can relate. He had a habit of leaving it on in his workshop, and while I was in the process of physically deteriorating, it was utter agony to be a party to his media consumption. I almost would have thought that the bright colors would be pleasant, in a way, for someone of your proclivities, though, so I suppose it’s possible that -”

She groans exaggeratedly.

“Look, Rose Ex Machina, no offense, but your potassium-chloride-bonfire deal isn’t really doing it for me either. And the talking. I can’t… do this, right now. Go nuts on the appearifier. I’m going back to sleep.”

This would normally be the juncture at which you would blink illustratively in bemusement, but all you can really do is sigh again as Terezi hurries away, cursing and pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead.

Perhaps you simply aren’t as close to her, in this iteration of reality, as you remember from other paths you’ve tread. A shame. You aren’t feeling all that capable of building a relationship from scratch, at the moment, and you’d been somewhat hopeful that your father might not be your only confidant on the ship.

Ah, well.

Stepping carefully through the damp leaves piled around the appearifier, you find your way to the machine, press your palm to the console, and halt its progress.

You don’t especially like what this delineation of tasks augurs of your future obligations in matters of spaceship housekeeping, but you decide to bite the bullet and shoulder on through. A single refuse-disposal airlock leads directly from the galley into the cold vacuum of space. Quite convenient, you suppose, and it’s not as though you have anything more exciting to do.

To keep you company while you clean up the mess, you slip the little pamphlet from the pocket of your god tier smock, tapping a finger to the number two.

“Welcome back! Or, uh, welcome front, I guess, if you decided to go through these items out of order and this is your first foray into this assistive program! I’ll admit, there’s an appeal to both paths, isn’t there? This is kind of an easy one, a bit of a gimme, as far as this list goes, so I’m getting it out of the way early. I’ve got a full script and everything!”

You do find it pleasant to have someone talking to you. It’s odd, how much you can come to miss something that you have found so objectionable, at intervals, when it is almost entirely absent. He smooths a piece of paper out, and sets it somewhere outside of the holo recorder device’s field of capture.

“Okay! Very good. Ahem. When I say ‘unlimited appearifier aperture’, the first question folks always have about this setup is, well, about the whole ‘unlimited’ aspect of things! How much really is ‘unlimited’? How on Earth C are our generous partners at Crockercorp logistically providing such a thing?”

To be fair, that was, more or less, your first question, though you don’t imagine most people making use of these ships encounter them for the first time while they are actively testing the boundaries of conceptual unlimitedness.

You scoop up massive armfuls of leaves, finding that the hologram travels with you as you deliver them to the airlock and back for a second trip.

“Great question! Well, as we all know, an appearifier only works through displacement of matter through time and space. There isn’t any transmutation involved. Anything you choose to appearify is actually translocated from a sprawling Crockercorp warehouse facility, to which any owners of Crockercorp appearifiers can gain personal access! The brilliance of it is this, and, oh, I’m going to break script, because Janey really is just the best in the business, you can’t make this stuff up, her _mind_... so, you’d think, here, ‘why don’t the warehouses run dry long before one can climb the tangent curve off towards infinite… oh, say, breadsticks?’ I mean, probably not in quite so many words, haha.”

That really would have been your next question. Why, for the love of all that is relevant and essential, would anyone in their right mind dedicate the warehouse space necessary to store this much damp full-leaf tobacco?

“Well, great question, I would say, if this were an interactive program!” he laughs. “And then I’d tell you, would you believe that every item that you appearify comes from the same… I suppose it’d be called a spawn point, wouldn’t it? See, Janey had the idea, based on a whole set of shenanigans that happened back before we all created this universe, to make practical use of the temporal translocation capacity of these little fellows!”

But that would generate a paradox, wouldn’t it? An item can’t be transported anywhere once it’s already gone, unless…

“So, the way I made sense of it, is sort of… beating one paradox with another paradox! It was ol’ Zeno himself that came up with the arrow and target trick, y’know, the arrow that travels halfway to the target every instant. Each time, the distance gets sliced in half all over again, and the arrow never hits home until you hit a unit that can't be cut in half! So, when we’ve got, say, an apple in the Crockercorp warehouse, and someone appearifies it off to the troll kingdom, it loses the latter half of its temporal existence in the warehouse. Then, let’s say I get hungry while I’m visiting my best bro in his workshop! I tap some coordinates into his Crockercorp Appearifier and presto, I’m enjoying, in my spatiotemporal reality, the latter temporal half of the crisp pink lady’s existence in the warehouse, absent the half that some hungry troll got to enjoy when he appearified it! The halves keep getting smaller, but the apple doesn’t get any less real in the dimensions to which it’s appearified, just occupies a slice-of-a-slice-of-a-slice of a temporal space in the spatial location of origin!”

He looks up expectantly at someone who would be located directly over your shoulder if they were in the room and not… wherever Jake was when recording this part of the tutorial.

“Yes, I think that did nicely,” he murmurs to himself. “So, you see, you can really get just about any raw ingredients that it might be challenging to alchemize, and in service to our various military and diplomatic endeavors, Crockercorp has generously lifted the throttle and allowed for infinite usage for the duration of your trip on our starship here!”

Hefting tobacco leaves proves fairly easy to do in your embodied accommodations, which is actually somewhat exciting, since you’ve never really been a candidate for olympic athletics. Gravity and the poor adhesion of the leaves to one another proves a greater obstacle than their weight, and you’re just about done as he wraps up his spiel.

“Remember, moderation in all things, including moderation. I mean, it wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t abuse it just a teensy bit, right? I’m sure Jane won’t mind, that’s the whole point, to make this more pleasant for everyone! So, ah, go ahead! Have some fun during your mealtimes, and don’t forget to say a big thanks to Crockercorp while you’re at it!”

He gives you a perfectly executed wave and a grin, and the program cuts out, though not before activating tutorial mode on the nearest appearifier.

Well, alright. That’s not much use to you, but you decide to give it a try. Synching up with the device, you enter the coordinates for a little hand broom, and get to work on the bits of plant matter that you missed.

Now that the galley is silent, you think that you might as well read while you work, and you try to turn back through to your place in Complacency of the Learned. It really is kind of delightful to reread your old work, no matter how you cringe a bit at some of your turns of phrase.

Try as you might, though, you can’t find the same version that you had been so enjoying earlier. A damper on an already anticlimactic… well, it might as well be afternoon.

You’re disappointed to remember, time and time again, how many literary hoops you’d jumped through as a callow youth, attempting to maneuver Calmasis into a happy ending. Happy in a manner of speaking, at least. At the time, you’d considered the dissolution of any sort of natural order, an end to the institution of prophecy, and the ascendance of the young wizard to demiurgic omnipotence to be about the best ending that could be mustered up. It was more or less your ten-year career goal, though no one especially wanted to hear about it.

Reading through that other… iteration?

Seer of Light or not, some part of you must have always known that the quest for ultimate power had a better-than-average chance of ending in tragedy.

If only you could remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [gets carried away writing Complacency of the Learned]


End file.
